The Effectiveness of a Counseling Program to Improve the Psychological Flexibility and Reduce the Career Future Anxiety among the Undergraduates Students in the Jordanian Private Universities

Abstract

The study aimed to identify the effectiveness of a counseling program in improving the psychological flexibility and reducing the career future anxiety among the undergraduates in the Jordanian private universities. The study sample consisted of (40) male and female students expected to graduate in the second semester of 2016/2017 from Jerash National University and Jadara University who were chosen according to their scores on the study scales. They were chosen from the humanitarian and scientific faculties, and they had scored the highest grades on the professional future anxiety scale and the lowest scores on the psychological flexibility scale. They had been distributed into two equal groups: control and experimental. The study scales were developed after confirming its reliability and validity. A behavioral, cognitive counseling program was prepared consisting of (16) counseling sessions by two sessions weekly and it was applied on the members of the experimental group by the researcher. The results indicated the presence of a clear improvement in the mean performance of the members of the experimental group with regards to the post-test; where the level of the psychological flexibility increased and the level of the career future anxiety decreased; the study also pointed that there are no significant differences due to the effect of gender and faculty and the interaction between them indicating the effectiveness of the counseling program. The study concluded a number of recomindation, most important of which was the importance of providing specialists in the educational and psychological counseling in the deanships of student affairs at universities to help students in facing psychological pressures and crises.